Have humans been in America 2,500 years longer than we thought? (NYT)

What you learned about America’s earliest humans might be misleading — or at least off by a couple thousand years.

The recent discovery of primitive tools in Texas near Austin has some scientists thinking we might have been here as early as 15,500 years ago. And that’s roughly 2,500 years earlier than previously thought.

Archeologists have long referred to the earliest humans in the Americas as “Clovis people,” after a city in New Mexico where their artifacts were first discovered nearly 100 years ago. But the well-preserved tools found in Texas at a site named Buttermilk Creek were discovered in a layer of sediment underneath the one where Clovis relics are typically found.

From a New York Times story:

No one knows exactly who these migrating people were, scientists said. Genetic studies of ancient bones and later Native Americans indicate their ancestors came from northeast Asia, possibly across the Bering land bridge at a time of low sea levels during the last ice age. But it has puzzled scientists that nothing like the Clovis technology has ever been found in Siberia.